The Cisco 7961 is designed to meet the needs of managers and administrative assistants. It provides six programmable backlit line/feature buttons and four interactive soft keys that guide a user through features, and audio controls for high-quality duplex speakerphone, handset, and headset. A built-in headset port and an integrated Ethernet switch are standard with the Cisco Unified IP Phone 7961.

The large LCD displays features such as date and time, caller ID, and digits dialled. It allows for the inclusion of higher value, more visibly rich Extensible Markup Language (XML) applications and double-byte languages. The Cisco 7961 is dynamic, and designed to grow with system capabilities, through software updates to the phone flash memory.

No hands-on moves and changes are required with the phone; the user can simply pick up the phone and move to the new location anywhere on your network.